SLR lenses on your digital video camera

Considering all the attention we give digital cameras, I wanted to find an interesting hack for those old school analog SLR cameras. (I spent a fair share of time behind one; I’m fond of the classic Canon AE-1) [Joshua] mated his Sony VX-2000e video camera with a Canon FD lens mount and created this monster. With the new lens mount, he’s got a full selection of lenses without the huge investment of specialized lenses.

Newer lens lines by Canon and Nikon have demolished the price of older manual focus lenses. You can get, high quality manual lenses for almost nothing. I use FD lenses on my rebel all the time, just wish the adapter was clearer. Just hit up eBay and you’ll see how cheap I mean.

The problem with adapting FD-mount lenses to an EOS-mount camera like the Rebel is that the two are dimensionally incompatible. EOS-mount lenses sit closer to the film plane. FD-mount lenses on an adapter can’t focus to infinity unless the adapter contains extra optics, and of course that tends to lower the picture quality.

The benefit of mounting a 35mm lens on a small video camera is to obtain the same field of view and depth of field as a 35mm lens. From the looks of things, this particular hacker missed the boat by not including a ground glass or similar. There are many examples of DIY in this arena, and a number of them have become commercial products. Notably the Redrock M2 http://www.redrockmicro.com/micro35.html and the Cinevate Brevis 35 http://www.cinevate.com/website/index.php

I’d like to know how to use an old 500 mm cat lens on my zoom digital (Kodak z612) for astrophotography. There must be some way to use an adapter tube, an adapter ring (I removed the Pentax bayonet mount ring from the lens) to do this. But how?